Hi.  This is LOuie.  It seriously is me. Im even going to leave
the O stuipdly capatalized because who would pay an intern to do
that?? Okay so you bought the thing with my fat face on it and
you clicked the button that said i could email you. And i know
that now you are thinking “aw shit. Why’d i let this guy into my
life this way?”. Well dont worry. Because i really swear it that
i wont bug you. I will not abuse this privalage of having your
email. You wont hear from me again… Probably, unless i have
something new to offer you. The reason i’m writing now, in the
back of a car taking me to the Tonight Show set, is to let you
know that as of now there is some new and cool stuff on my site,
related to Live at the Beacon Theater. Theres a thing where you
can download and print a dvd box cover and label so you can burn
and make your own dvd of the video. And theres a new option where
you can gift the special to as many people as you want (for 5
bucks each) and they’ll get a nice gifty email from you with a
link to the video.

Also, some of you may know, i recently made a statement (that
sounds so dumb. Like i’m the president or something) about how the
video has been doing online. Im pasting it in here below in case
you missed it.

Lastly I’m planning to put some more outtakes of the show on
youtube and i think i will put one on the site that is only
available for free to you folks on this list, who bought the
thing and opted in. But dont hold me to that because really i
just thought of it and typed it.

Okay well please have a happy rest of the year and more happy
years after that. And please even have been happy in your past.
What?

Thanks again for giving me 5 dollars. I bought 3 cokes with it.

Regards. Sincerely, Actually,

Louis

===========================
People of Earth (minus the ones who don’t give a shit about
this): it’s been amazing to conduct this experiment with you. The
experiment was: if I put out a brand new standup special at a
drastically low price ($5) and make it as easy as possible to
buy, download and enjoy, free of any restrictions, will everyone
just go and steal it? Will they pay for it? And how much money
can be made by an individual in this manner?

It’s been 4 days. A lot of people are asking me how it’s going.
I’ve been hesitant to share the actual figures, because there’s
power in exclusive ownership of information. What I didn’t expect
when I started this was that people would not only take part in
this experiment, they would be invested in it and it would be
important to them. It’s been amazing to see people in large
numbers advocating this idea. So I think it’s only fair that you
get to know the results. Also, it’s just really cool and fun and
I’m dying to tell everybody. I told my Mom, I told three friends,
and that wasn’t nearly enough. So here it is.

First of all, this was a premium video production, shot with six
cameras over two performances at the Beacon Theater, which is a
high-priced elite Manhattan venue. I directed this video myself
and the production of the video cost around $170,000. (This was
largely paid for by the tickets bought by the audiences at both
shows). The material in the video was developed over months on
the road and has never been seen on my show (LOUIE) or on any
other special. The risks were thus: every new generation of
material I create is my income, it’s like a farmer’s annual crop.
The time and effort on my part was far more than if I’d done it
with a big company. If I’d done it with a big company, I would
have a guarantee of a sizable fee, as opposed to this way, where
I’m actually investing my own money.

The development of the website, which needed to be a very robust,
reliable and carefully constructed website, was around $32,000.
We worked for a number of weeks poring over the site to make sure
every detail would give buyers a simple, optimal and humane
experience for buying the video. I edited the video around the
clock for the weeks between the show and the launch.

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12
hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned
$250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As
of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over
$500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a
profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I
would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the
show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you
about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted
and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would
have owned your private information for their own use. They would
have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way,
you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you
can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or
Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you).
You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from
us again.

I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have
shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say
that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t
many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all
get to know that about people and stuff. I’m really glad I put
this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again. If the
trend continues with sales on this video, my goal is that i can
reach the point where when I sell anything, be it videos, CDs or
tickets to my tours, I’ll do it here and I’ll continue to follow
the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not
overmarketing to you, keeping as few people between you and me as
possible in the transaction. (Of course i reserve the right to go
back on all of this and sign a massive deal with a company that
pays me fat coin and charges you straight up the ass.). (This is
you: yes Louie. And we’ll all enjoy torrenting that content. You
fat sweaty dolt).

I probably sound kind of crazy right now. It’s been a really fun
and intense few days. This video was paid for by people who
bought tickets, and then bought by people who wanted to see that
same show. I got to do exactly the show I wanted, and exactly the
show you wanted.

I also got an education. And everything i learned are things i
was happy to learn. I learned that people are interested in what
happens and shit (i didn’t go to college)

I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something
that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or
it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative
interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be
shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common
interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.

I want to thank Blair Breard who produced this video and produces
my series LOUIE, and I want to thank Caspar and Giles at Version
Industries, who created the website.

I hope with all of my heart that I stay funny. Otherwise this all
goes to hell. Please have a safe and happy holiday, and thank you
again for all this crazy shit.

Sincerely, Louis C.K.

Web developers please comment – show your disdain for Adobe’s complete bullshit FTP implementation in Dreamweaver.  Here we are, almost 10 years and 10 or so versions later, and the same bugs and issues from the beginning are still plaguing that oh-so-necessary part of Dreamweaver’s otherwise job-saving functionality.  For about 5 percent of what Dreamweaver costs, you can get Transmit (for mac), which is absolutely rock-solid for managing FTP transfers.  HELLOOOOOOO Adobe is anyone home?  I called their support and this what the guy told me… “Dreamweaver isn’t really an FTP app, I mean… that’s not really what most people use it for.”

He should be thrown in a tar pit.

So, I’m putting Dreamweaver’s FTP implementation ON THE LIST – cuz it’s sofware that sucks.  Really, really sucks.  Shouldn’t be legal to charge money for that crap.

What does Apple really have against Flash?  The message from Apple is out-of-touch and smug… The hype conveys a tone that suggests it’s common knowledge that Flash is some big problem on the web.  It isn’t. It’s got it’s faults, but it’s a sound technology that plays a major role in Web 2.0 content.  So on my iPad, if I’m reading a book about SEO, and I want to check my Google Analytics, bye-bye charts and graphs.  Prrretty lame.

Isn’t Apple getting a little hypocritical? Language from the Apple camp decries Flash as buggy and proprietary… hello?  My $4000 Mac Pro Tower came with an OS (10.6.0) that was rife with annoying bugs and issues, and for Apple to point the proprietary finger is a paradox so obvious it barely requires explanation.  The entire business model for the iPad is an insult to the intelligence of the Apple customer base… You aren’t going to convince us to keep running money through your (cr)App Store just by telling us that’s really what we want.  It isn’t.  We want real software and real Web 2.0 content, and we want Apple to shut the f*$k up and make really good computers and a great OS.

What device does Apple believe they’ve made, and for what market?  Their own website says it’s the best way to browse the web, hands-down.  Uh, if half the websites I use everyday just won’t work, how is that better than my MacBook?  It isn’t.  It’s a deal-breaker.  Why on earth would my generation, with our open-source world and the software ethos we’ve developed, allow Apple to take away all of our priceless web 2.0 apps just so they can make us buy packaged versions of them through their store?  It’s ridiculous and downright greedy, although it’s a deviously brilliant way to pull the plug on the majority of free web-based apps.

Apple is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, don’t kid yourself.  Jobs has a reputation for being and having been a ruthless and difficult businessman and a extremely trying ego.  His whole “smile cuz we’re gonna change the world” shtick is a complete facade.  I want to like Apple, I really do.  Their hardware and OS are superior I’m a huge fan of my iPhone.  But I want Apple to let me have my Apple on my terms, not theirs.  That ruffles ol-turtleneck’s feathers.

In light of my grievances, I’ve thought of a few enhancements that the next version of the iPad should have.

1. New Name – “Max iPad.” Conveys a sense a confidence.  This is a professional device, and as we all know, being a professional can involve a heavy workflow.  But regardless if you have a heavy flow one day and a more medium flow the next, you know the Max iPad will have you covered.

2. More Storage – When your workflow is heavy, you need to be able to count on a device that can really absorb the load.  Over the course of a long hard day at work you can express a huge volume of stuff, and it needs to be held somewhere until you can dump it into something, like your backup hard drive.

3. Waterproof It – When it comes to a device like this, you need to know that what you want outside will stay outside and what you want inside will stay inside.  A tight-fitting moisture lock barrier, designed for out-of-the-way comfort, would ensure that no enormous volumes of liquid end up where you don’t want them.  Avoid embarrassment resulting from leaks and accidents that may occur in your briefcase.

4. Add Wings – On long flights and bumpy car rides, you expect a device like this to stay firmly fastened in place, and to be large enough to really do the job.  If the device had a  strap, or maybe… some kind of  “wing” like fasteners, it would be easy to hold it securely.  By wrapping the “wings” around the side of and fastening to the bottom of one’s legs, the device would be held safely where you want it.

5. Lose the Dock – Most Max iPad users will be uncomfortable with using the dock, as it will involve inserting the device into a slot to use those features.  The Max iPad doesn’t require any insertion into any slot, you just strap it into your lap and go.

So, Sarah Palin has quit the governorship.  That’s just wierd, right?  Looking back, it seems to the make the GOP self-sabotage theory make some sort of twisted sense.  So before anyone else jumps on it I want to officially announce her new late-night talkshow humor name, “Sarah Bailin”.  (Well someone actually beat me too it 23 hours ago according to blogspot but I just learned that after thinking of it by myself, I swear.)   She says she has new ways to “make a difference” according to her statement, but who would trust her to not bail on that?  Until we hear something, we are left wondering.

Any thoughts?  Is there an Internet angle on this? Yup.  Sarah Palin is officially one of the most searched-for topics on the ‘Net right now, right up there with Michael Jackson according to CNN.  If she did have some angle she wanted to push, now would be the time to get heard.  Most suspiciously, she’s rather quiet however, compared to the motor-mouth days that we all know and love her for, late-night hacks included (read: Jimmy Fallon).

The most telling thing she did say was that she felt politics had become a “bloodsport.”  Become?  Hasn’t it always been?  I think she took an x-million dollar book deal, realized politics was way harder than telling a writer what to say, and bailed.  Plain and simple.  Clearly there is some shame on the part of her and her team, as her home page headline currently mention only her disinterest in a second term, and makes no mention of the real news, which is that she’s ending her term early, leaving her state with an additional and very costly transition to make and in the lurch on a variety of programs and policies that stem from her administration. Quitting mid term?  Total bail move.  Not seeking re-election?  Less of a bail move.  Shooting moose from a chopper? Priceless.

It’s much softer, yet the glaring omission of truth is somehow a much harsher blow for me.  To be honest, I would do the same thing.  If I got sick of putting up with all that bullshit I would walk right out the door and tell everyone to kiss my ass on the way out.  Naturally, Mrs. Bailin would have many takers. Somehow, it just wouldn’t feel right though, knowing how she just lied to us all like that.  What a flirt.

Setting the Stage
About a month ago I leased a virtual dedicated sever from GoDaddy to setup some very basic hosting for a batch of new websites. No, I was not hammered when I did that. GoDaddy has a great rate and good support (despite what the popular opinion is).  True, they are not the people to go to if you want your prissy Linux ass kissed but they can stick a server in a rack as good as anyone else, so I decided to take my chances.  All things considered (i.e. the fact that I know Linux just about well enough to post a website) it’s been going well.

I did however have a problem with the mail server, as apparently GoDaddy didn’t see fit to point it at their mandatory relay server when they provisioned it for me.    How were they supposed to know I would want to send email from a web hosting server? It’s not like they can read minds.

All sarcasm aside they actually helped me out… I took the email response to my support ticket and used it.  They mentioned that  /etc/exim.conf needed to have a mail routing directive in it that wasn’t there.  Simple enough, once I edited the file, saved it, and restarted Exim, the mail started flowing from the queue.  Nonetheless, some support tickets to me from my customers were generated during the day or so of downtime, which one would expect.  After I cleared those up and got everyone back on the gravy train, I was really jazzed… I learned a bunch of Unix, found some new confidence, and took care of my customers.

The Situation Room
So after about 10 straight hours of YUI library madness last Wednesday, I got a call from my buddy Bill.  Bill had just received an order of four hundred reggae 45′s and was eager to go through them.  Bill knows I have a soft spot for reggae 45′s.  Bill also knows that Reggae 45′s lead to Guinness, which leads to Jameson, which usually leads to some type of “oh shit” moment.   Like Oh shit, I just spilled beer on your keyboard. Or the old Oh shit, it’s 4:45 in the morning. And who can forget the timeless classic Oh shit,  was I supposed to delete that? This is why I go places besides my cozy little home office and studio to party.   Preferably, when I get to the “oh shit” part of the night, I like to be a safe distance from my work.   Ideally, when I get to the “oh shit” stage, everything is done and there isn’t any work waiting.  This was the case last Wednesday.  Clients happy (or so I was lead to believe) and all things handled, right?  Well… not quite, but not far off either… thanks to the handy-dandy iPhone.

Email Down in Sector 7
Somewhere around 9:30, after my 3rd shot and halfway into my 3rd beer, I felt the iPhone buzz in my coat pocket.  I wasn’t exactly inebriated, but I wasn’t about to volunteer as driver either.  Couple of taps later I’m reading an email from one of my most recent launches.  Apparently the CEO is having email trouble again.  Damn, I thought.  I just fixed that server.  I know it’s working.  Or do I?  I’m no Unix server expert, and I’m kinda drunk. The guy I know who is a Unix expert just wasn’t going to be available then, and the thought of having to get up early and have this handled by start of business was agonizing.  I wanted to fix it right then and forget about it…  for my client’s benefit as well as my own.  Even though I wasn’t sure what was wrong, I had a hunch… if something you fixed breaks soon thereafter, check your fix.

With a little (probably a lot) of the old liquid courage in me, I decided to attempt some basic server-side troubleshooting from my new iPhone.  The following I will attempt to type in such a way that it goes down in real-time in your brain. If you hold your breath while reading, it will make your head spin which will add to the realism.  OK, ready?  Go:

I wonder if there is a free SSH client in the iPhone app store yet. 1 right thumb drag.  Open App Store.  Search.  SSH.  Enter. Oh look, there is something called Tapterm with the letters SSH written big on the logo.  It’s Free. Tap free, buy, ********, enter.  Tap toes in an alternating pattern for approximately 15 seconds.  It’s Done. Open the new app.  Tap quick connect.  154.872.something.  loginnamehere, enter,  ********,  enter,  su root,  ******, enter.  vi /etc/exim.conf, enter.  Search. Smart_host. enter.  OK.  Still there.  My config file is just as I left it.  Holy crap I just term’d into my VDS with my phone, and less than 2 minutes ago I didn’t even know I could do that.

OK Breathe.  Cool, right?  It’s like performing server maintenance drunk.  Who doesn’t want to do that? After confirming that my email server should be working (that’s always a good place to start) I went ahead and logged on to my client’s webmail.

All Systems Go
Safari.  webmail.client.com.  Enter.  loginnamehere, *****. Tap compose.  chris@didgie.com.  Subject.  test.  Tap the body, test. Send.   Before I could put the phone down it buzzed again, this time notifying me of the arrival of my test message sent seconds earlier.  Sweet, webmail is working.  So what is this guy doing wrong? After sending him a short message confirming that his webmail is indeed working, I put the phone down for a rest.  That was one seriously productive 3 minutes.  By then Bill had 2 more shots of Jameson waiting, and was about to crack the chaser.  If you know the kinda people I know, you know that one way to get someone off the phone fast is to hand them a room temperature can of Guinness, cracking the top just as you let go.  Jerk.  Now I look like I wet myself.

After cleaning up and chatting with Bill long enough for him to drift off into You Tube land again I went back to the counter by the turntables and glanced at my phone.  Huh, another new message. Tap email.  Tap subject. Hmmm. Tap reply.  Hi Bob… actually, it’s webmail.clientname.com. Send. 

Oh shit, I thought to myself. This guy was logging in to the wrong server.

That’s definitely going down in my list of all-time favorites.

PLATFORM:  GoDaddy VDS running CPANEL and WHM on Fedora Linux.

ISSUE:  GD or Curl libraries are not working in PHP.

KNOWNS: The libraries are actually installed.  YUM or other package managers confirm this.  PHPInfo() does not display them as active, however.  Compile tags do not indicate the inclusion of GD or CURL (no with-gd2 or with-curl type directives).

SOLUTION: PHP needs to be re-compiled, this time with the available libraries.

STEPS:
Rather than do it the hard way via command line, let CPanel do the work for you.  NOTE:  proceed with caution if you already have live sites or projects hosted on the server you are recompiling.  You are about to rebuild Apache, so if you have a custom configuration in place, you will need to be comfortable with backing that up and re-applying it.  The CPanel build routine is very forgiving and stable, if it messes up, it won’t install the rebuild, and if the install of the re-build fails, it will restore your working Apache/PHP installation.  As well,  if you do not make sure to include libraries that you have in use in production code, the re-compile of PHP will break existing sites and you will have to do it all over again.  I did this process with 6 live websites, each needing MYSQLI as well as the PHP basics.  I had no problems. Assuming your server is relatively virgin, and that you won’t get strangled by a suit tomorrow if the isht hits the fan, proceed with the following steps.

1. Open CPanel WHM.

2. On the default page, click “software”.

3. Click on the “Easy Apache” option.

4. Walk through the first few options.  Select your apache version (might as well select the latest), select your PHP version (again, PHP 5, latest minor version).  After that you’ll land on a page that asks you to select from a handful of extensions.  Click the “exhaustive options list” button.

5.  This part is important.  You need to check off all the libraries that you want PHP to make available after compiling.   This means you need to select all the extensions that you already had, if you are using any, as well as the ones you want to add, namely GD and Curl for the purposes of this example.  You’ll need to scroll all the way down to the last list of options on the page to find all the usual PHP candy.

6.  At the bottom of the options page, give the configuration you just created a name, a display name (this is what will show on the first page of the Easy Apache tool from now on, making it handy to re-run this build if necessary, or enhance it wihtout having to re-check all your extensions).

7.  Click Save and Build.

8.  Wait about 20 minutes for the process to complete, and then give your HTTPD a hard restart.

9.  Voila!  You will notice that PHPInfo() now reveals the presence of GD and Curl, and calls to gd_info() and curl_init() from any php page will confirm their presence.

Hope that’s helpful!  It worked for me.  I realize re-building apache is a lot of extra overhead for fixing this issue alone, but given that CPanel works with it’s own apache/php installation, it really is the easiest way to do it.

I’ll start off diplomatic. As phones go, it’s a nice device; generous keyboard, a decent suite of Google software, and a useable, if a little unexciting, interface. I wasn’t immediately turned off. I had high hopes… after all, I was already a T-Mobile customer, and I wanted the ‘droid to be super awesome.

Anyway, after listening to Scott make up answers to my questions for a few minutes, I realized the GMail page I had opened a few minutes earlier still hadn’t opened… even though the phone was connected to the store’s wi-fi. Hmmm, bummer.

I pressed the refresh icon on the screen, and again waited.  After about 20 or 30 seconds the site finally loaded, assembling itself  in a herky-jerky fashion.  This was in stark contrast to the speed and slick feel of Safari on the iPhone.   My buddy Sean had taken me on an action-packed (I mean that almost literally) tour of his just a few hours earlier. Too bad for Scott.

I really really really wanted the G1 to be great, but alas, it wasn’t.  It was slow, clunky, difficult to control, and unintuitive.  Common actions (like silencing your phone, or seeing a list of your contacts) were too many taps away, and the software suite didn’t convince me quick enough that it would deliver the freedom that I desire, that I imagine exists in the mobile, super-synced, data-tracked world of effortless Web 2.0 productivity goodness that awaits me.

I’m sure I’m wrong about something, I’ll undoubtedly get a comment that “you can silence the phone like this” or “this is the contact view” but the point is, I’m a total nerd and I walked away unsure.  That doesn’t say alot about the device.  I figure out new javascript libraries on my Sundays, and usually have my avatar on my father’s meager new Nokia cell phone  within seconds of absconding it from his coat pocket.

So I went ahead and walked back over to the 10-minute oil change spot where my wife was waiting for our burgundy Mariner to finish up and told her about my experience.

“Should we run over to the Apple Store then?”  She asked encouragingly, as if she knew I wouldn’t be satisfied, and the trip to the ol’ black-turtleneck market was a sure thing all along.

“Yeah.”  She was right.

Anyway, after walking out of the depressing dungeon of intellect that is a T-Mobile store, the Apple Store was a refreshing and almost disarming experience.  The assistant that greeted me at the door took no shortage of time to find me the right help and to listen to my long-winded grievances about T-Mobile and my current “smart” phone, the Dash.   After I was convinced that I wanted to make the purchase, the process took a total of about 20 minutes to purchase the phone, transfer my number from T-Mobile, setup an AT&T mobile account, and receive my first call on my new iPhone.   Did I just buy a cellphone?  That wasn’t anything like buying a car or starting a life insurance policy.  Strange.

I have to take my hat off to Apple and AT&T on this one.  They have made the process of moving into an iPhone so painless, so easy, and so fun, I can’t see why anyone would waste their time on any other type of smart device.   If the iPhone is in your budget (if you are a technology or other service professional, it probably should be), I can’t overstate the ways in the which the iPhone will meet and exceed your expectations, both as a superior phone, but as the ultimate mobile productivity device.

I’m going to follow up this post with a detail article about the ways you can use the iPhone to increase your productivity and ease your workflow.  But for now, I’m going to wrap by making a bold statement.  There is the iPhone, and there are a bunch of crappy other devices that almost cut it but end up just being frustrating.  The G1 is not an iPhone.  You do the math.

1. HTML – Hypertext Markup Language – the bread and butter of the web still, it is one of three languages that must be spoken by the first end user – the web browser. Although many of us don’t write much dry html anymore, if you don’t know what it’s doing, debugging a nested <div> tag issue can be a nightmare. HTML is still very relevant, and continues to progress in important ways. For instance… if you are still writing table tags instead of div tags (unless you have a good design reason), you aren’t getting the most out of what your layout can do in 2008.

2. CSS – Cascading Style Sheets – CSS broke out in a big way about 10 years ago now and has become the standard for styling web pages. CSS2.0 is on the horizon and will dramatically change the way we think of styling as it will make page formatting and styling conditional and dynamic, without using a server-side language like PHP or ASP to decide with style to apply. Knowing what your CSS is doing can be the difference between a site that looks great and a site that looks like Craig’s List. As well, knowing the smart way to use CSS is the difference between a client-requested change taking 2 seconds and taking 2 hours. Definitely a need-to-know item.

3. JavaScript – JS just isn’t going anywhere. The most popular frameworks today basically require it, and the strength of JS developments in web browsers has allowed a new technology, AJAX, to basically transform the landscape of the web and usher in the era of Web 2.0. The Ruby on Rails and Flash and Adobe Air crowds would have you believe they hold the key to the next generation of the internet. This may be true, but the key is made out of Javascript. The interactive Internet requires your browser to send information back to the server… for now, this requires JavaScript, and I don’t see it going anywhere. In fact, it’s safe to say that a single JavaScript object has single-handedly transformed the web – httprequest.

4. PHP – PHP runs the Internet, period. For proof, check here. This is the best assemblage web programming language statistics I could find, you’ll notice perusing this info that PHP is always at the top of the list, usually the most popular of any language that is currently used to develop specifically for the web. The reason why PHP is still so compelling, beyond what I mentioned above, is because as the web’s primary open-source and community developed technology, it continues to be developed, improved, supported, and extremely well documented on the internet. PHP, as popular as it is, pails in comparison however, to the sheer ubiquity of my next subject….

5. SQL – Structured Query Language, really does run the world. Everytime you buy gas, groceries, look up your bank account balance, send (postal) mail, run your FastPass over the bridge, or do anything else that requires data to be moved, recorded, queried, or otherwise interacted with, a SQL statement is sent somewhere. Originally invented in 1975 by IBM, it is easily the most popular, longest-running, most impactful, and most popular language alive today in the world of technology. Just look at the statistics on the link I mentioned earlier… the most telling is the Craig’s List statistic, in which they measure programming language popularity by the number of jobs offered on Craig’s List pertaining to each language. SQL is far and away the winner… there are a lot of ways to program an interface… C, C#, PHP/HTML/JavaScript, etc… but they all talk to a database, and they all use SQL to do it. Select * from everything where exists = true.

So othere you have it. 5 languages. The only easy part is that you can count them on one hand. At least you don’t have to write code in Mandarin Chinese, huh?

Marketing psychology has taught us that by rekindling emotions attached to positive memories and experiences we can effectively associate those emotions with a new memory or experience. That new experience can be of something physical, like a car or a video game system, but it can also be (and often with much greater effect) something abstract; like a political cause, a lifestyle, or an artistic movement. If a product or experience tickles just the right common need or cultural experience, positive emotions and memories can be associated with it in a massive scale, effecting the rise of a trend (This process is well-examined in Malcolm Gladwell’s the Tipping Point, highly recommended reading).

In the Internet era of today, Gladwell’s principle is working at near-light speed, creating and destroying trends with such frenzy that often, by the time it’s been in your inbox for a week, it’s already out-of-vogue. In a time when creative media and culture move so fast, production demands alone insist on the use of familiarity and derivation. Because profitable companies are necessarily adverse to risk, there is little incentive to try content and design that is actually “new”, so the content of our movies, music, ads, and visual art is simply “newer than” the last thing… enough to be different and offer something new, but derived from a familiar idea that instantly conveys the cultural, economic, and style cues needed for the consumer to recognize the “new” thing as being safely associated with something that is already culturally relevant and accepted.

Of the examples that come to mind, none are more striking than that of the Internet. From its interface and infrastructure to the nature of its content, the Internet is a light-speed creative-derivation network that is constantly humming. One creative idea is constantly being derived from another, whether it’s a YouTube video inspiring a legacy of spoofs and “versions” or a software program such as WordPress or Ruby on Rails inspiring countless derivatives that each, in their own way, offer something newer than the last thing without being “new” altogether. Interface improvements, revisions in branding, and innovations in product all required familiarity to be useful and relevant… the current designs of form elements, typefaces, keyboards and input devices all wear their influences and creative heritage unashamedly on their sleeve; being brand new would equal unfamiliarity and cultural irrelevance.

This is less fascinating than it is obvious… capitalism, economics, and the free market rely on the principle that new products will be easily derived from existing ones. What’s fascinating is the shift that has occurred in the content that is being delivered by the products. We expect the form and the mechanism to be familiar, but until about 10 years ago we expected and preferred for the content to be wholly original, actually “new”. A CD is a CD is a CD, until you fill it with music. YouTube would be just another SQL database and a hard drive somewhere if it weren’t populated with terrabytes of material. And that’s exactly the point. In order to produce the amount we consume, there is simply not enough “new” to create thousands of new songs and millions of new YouTube videos every year. But there is always enough “newer than.” The mainstays of industry and product design have known this for decades. Today, popular artists and designers of traditionally more creative content, from music to movies to writing to visual art, are following their lead.

For all the hype, my money is still on PHP. I’ve recently turned the corner, translating the framework I’ve longed used to build simple ASP websites into PHP. Why? Several reasons really. First, ASP is a dead language. Although it still powers a huge amount of web data, and technically was the first active-server page of it’s kind, it’s no longer supported or developed by Microsoft, it’s progenitor, who have instead put their eggs in the .Net basket since about ’04 or so now. Because ASP is no longer supported, some of it’s annoyances (like the lack of a dynamic file-include function, instead it’s a pre-compile server directive) have become glaring holes in it’s competance when compared to the ever-growing, ever-updated PHP scene. Now on version 5 something, PHP continues to grow, thanks to the basic power that made it so popular to begin with… nobody owns it. This freedom allows for a phenomenal pace of development and improvement, and has shown to be the biggest strength PHP has. In fact, I think it fair to say, that alongside SQL, PHP pretty much runs the world these days. I know what a lot of programmers out there are thinking… why am I even wasting time talking about ASP? Isn’t that an old topic and a dead horse? You’d think so. But thousands of websites out there still live in classic ASP land, and if you’ve ever worked for a big development shop, you run across plenty of them as the jobs come in the door.

Asp.net tries to do what a lot of other solutions do now, it is a full-featured development framework. But as browsers continue to change, and Javascript and CSS get better, waiting for Microsoft’s .Net “controls” (basically combinations of CSS and javascript that mimic software features, much the way people use Rails and Scriptaculous or something like MooTools) to catch up became a pain in the you-know-what. And Microsoft’s new system, Expression, is similar… it is based on technologies that move too fast for a corporate bohemoth’s yearly update schedule.

That’s why prototype and script.aculo.us are so popular, alongside mootools, jquery, and others. These projects often have more than one new release in a month, and respond incredibly quickly to technological changes and discoveries in web browsers. The problem is that you really have to know your stuff to integrate them. You definitely can’t throw a “photoshop-export” web “developer” in front of a bunch of Javascript, CSS, PHP or Ruby, and HTML (let alone XML, SQL, etc) and expect them to speak the language. These creative types are better suited for the basic features of Dreamweaver or Expression but honestly, turning the results loose on a webserver can be disasterous for cross-browser compatibility, optimization, and server load. You just can’t trust a program to write the kind of code you need written. Especially not at the hands of a code novice.

This leads to my point. To be effective today on the Internet as a developer, to build websites that won’t bleed you dry with fixes and bugs and ongoing warranty issues, there is a bare minimum of 5 languages you need to know. 5, you say? That sounds like a lot.  Well, in part 2 of this post, I’ll make my case.